University Professor Stephen Kuusisto, Director of BBI’s Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach has a new book due out next week, a collection of poems entitled “Old Horse, What Is to Be Done?” It’s his seventh book and his third poetry collection. Of the volume he says: “The poems were written slowly over the past five years although some of them are mined from old notebooks I kept in times of deep solitude. The book is dedicated to the American poet Robert Bly. In my late twenties and early thirties, struggling with blindness and the overwhelming question of “how to live and what to do” Robert counseled me to accept imagination and loneliness as my secret companions.

This proved to be good advice. Blind, I wasn’t going to drive a cab in New York. A bookish life was certainly available.”

The poems are about many things: seasons, music, books, journeys, chance encounters. The title poem is about watching my wife’s old horse “Luigi” a thoroughbred as he looks out the window of his stall:

“Old Horse, What Is to Be Done?”
—for Robert Bly

I also want to live tonight
My pockets filled with ghost silver
The real coins I spent long ago
There are weeks, whole months
When I read only the ancients
I mean the dark one the river compulsive
A man who made clocks from string…
Time is a game played beautifully by children
Lately this is all I can think of
When I was very small I lived by a meadow
You loved me and I wasn’t confused

Kuusisto adds: “The “dark one” is an allusion to Herakleitos the Greek poet who said we can never step into the same river twice. Time is fleeing, our mortal lives are precious and short. I don’t know about the loneliness of horses. I don’t know if they meditate on growing old. But I knew as a child I loved them and as the poem says, I wasn’t confused.”